Nanotechnology & Social Networking

Imagine if Social Networking was controled by nanotechnology, millions of nanobots monitoring and fixing issues in the social network. Could nanobots be used to censor your posts and comments, will big brother be watching your every word through nanotechnology? How would you know?

Ray Kurzweil predicts that one day in the very near future we will merge with technology, yes, we will be one with our handheld devices, the Internet and so on. Ray wrote a book many years ago called “ The Singularity is Near“, which really talks about nanotechnology prolonging our lives and we human beings becoming machines, that’s the scary version from me. The book is more interesting than that but let’s cut to the quick.

So if we were to be merged with technology, how would our Social Network’s function, if you had a thought, would it be posted on Twitter & Facebook just because you had the thought? That may be overly simplistic but it’s a picture of how it might work.

There is very little being said about this merging of nanotechnology (The New Technology), which I find bothersome and yet energizing. Ray articulates this thoery far better than I ever can, he also has 15 doctorites and what have you, I’m just a guy who loves people first and technology somewhere down the line.

This is just a glimpse of what is yet to come, one of the many reason’s I’m writing and researching for my eBook The New Technology – The End of Mankind. Is it the dawn of the end for mankind, are we empowering machines, nanobots to think and act? Again, overly simplistic, but there needs to be a body that oversees the development and use of The New Technology we’ll know as Nano-technology.

Whether you agree or disagree, our Social activities will change sooner than you think and Virtual Reality is where we will spend most of our time.

One Response to Nanotechnology & Social Networking

If we’re approaching the End of Mankind — probably an absorbed mankind — perhaps the occasion will appear like an event horizon to the observer. The observers will forever be redefining mankind as it moves toward the singularity. Even if this occurs in a very abbreviated period of time, we will have the chore of perceiving an event that we can’t fully perceive. If there are two of you, one a transitioning being and the other a person trailing that being, it never appears to the trailing person that the transitioning being reaches the singularity. The horizon is always in the way.

Make sense? It doesn’t to me either. But I had to take a stab at it.

An electronic incarnation of human intelligence arguably is already taking place. The singularity, as I understand it with my journalism trained mind (read that as untrained), is a point at which machine intelligence exceeds all the combined human intelligence to this point in time. With computer power doubling over a period of roughly every 18 months, the math puts us somewhere in the vicinity of 2035 for this singularity. (Someone will be upset that I just blurred computing power and machine intelligence — what the heck.)

As we create avatars, we probably should consider how important these representations could wind up being in 25 years. We can shape and reshape them, but what is to stop some third party from interfering with our freedom? We will continue to insist on doing what we want in cyberspace. (It isn’t real, man…) But, is that desired? What happens when cyberspace replaces reality?

Will the world/reality be ruled by these beings who outlived their creators? Imagine some 50 or 200 years into the future and we are all warehoused in these facilities that feed us intravenously as our brains interact with cyberspace — ala Matrix. We eventually create enough of a cyber alter ego that the original host (human) intelligence is the smallest component of that “person.” The cyber person decides that the human intelligence is too trapped by physical boundaries. Even though the human has worked earnestly at expanding with injected knowledge and physical storage devices, the cyber person is compelled to make the decision the “meatcicle” is never going to keep up. The plug is yanked all across the warehouse. The lights go dim, except for the little green light that glows from the tiny device sitting on the human’s chest.

Meanwhile, nanotechnology has enabled cyberspace to break temporal barriers, too. The cyber persons who become lonely for their old selves can revisit their past lives, discovering anew what it is to laugh, play and love. Social media will live on.